VOL.1 Chapter 1: Disturbances at the Archaeological Site

September 10, 2025, 9:40 PM

Core Excavation Zone, Sanxingdui Archaeological Site, Guanghan, Sichuan Province

For seven consecutive days, frigid rain had clamped down relentlessly upon this land steeped in three thousand years of ancient history. There were no shifting convection winds, no drifting cloud banks—none of the natural cycles you would expect from a rainy night. It was as if an unseen giant hand had ripped this expanse of earth away from the ordinary mortal realm, locking it inside a pocket of stagnant, suffocating, deathly damp haze.

Villages just outside the three-kilometer perimeter around Sanxingdui enjoyed soft evening winds and faint glimmers of stars overhead. But directly above the dig site, pitch-black storm clouds hung low, and the bitter downpour never let up, creating an unnatural, isolated weather dead zone.

Live data streamed onto display screens at the provincial meteorological monitoring center told a contradictory tale: regional barometric pressure held steady, atmospheric circulation patterns were standard, no rain-bearing cloud formations were detected, and no severe weather warnings had been issued. Every piece of conventional scientific equipment confirmed that this site should be dry, calm, and free of rainfall entirely.

Still, sheets of icy drizzle hammered the tempered glass roof of the archaeological shelter nonstop. The dull, repetitive drumming hummed through day and night, like the slow, steady respiration of some primordial entity slumbering beneath the soil.

Deep within Sacrificial Pit No.3, harsh white industrial floodlights flooded hundreds of square meters of work surface. The flat, cold light stripped away all warmth and atmosphere, laying bare every grain of compacted rammed earth, every fleck of rust on broken bronze artifacts, and the tight, tense expressions of the site’s crew. Dozens of high-precision geomagnetic detectors, stratigraphic scanners, microseismic sensors, and spectral analyzers ran at full operational capacity, feeding real-time data back to the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Archaeology’s central server—all records logged, fully regulated, and accessible for public review.

Thirty-odd staff members moved through their assigned tasks with standardized, disciplined precision. To the outside world, this was nothing more than a routine national archaeological dig, a mundane overnight shift in a long string of ancient civilization research projects: steady, orderly, utterly unremarkable.

No one suspected that, tonight, Sanxingdui was slipping free from the rules that bound the mortal world.

At exactly 11:00 PM, the first sign of anomaly arrived, silent and unassuming.

There was no violent tremor, no shrill alarm—only an instantaneous four-degree temperature drop across the entire shelter, unfolding in the span of three heartbeats. The air thickened with cloying cold, a chill that seeped straight through work coveralls and clung to exposed skin; it carried a lifeless frost that felt alien to early autumn, alien even to the underground earth itself.

A young intern tasked with cleaning shard fragments shuddered instinctively, rubbing his arms and muttering under his breath, “It just got freezing all of a sudden—we turned the AC off hours ago.”

No one paused to acknowledge his confusion. Every crew member remained absorbed in tedious excavation labor, blind to this tiny yet ominous shift in the world around them.

11:07 PM: Every single piece of site equipment collapsed, all at once.

There were no sparks of power surges, no pop-up system error windows, no crackling short-circuit noises. The stratigraphic scanner closest to the main control room went pitch-black in an instant, its cooling fans cutting out mid-spin, the machine rendered completely inert as if its life force had been snuffed out in a split second.

Two beats of dead silence passed, then a catastrophic chain failure erupted.

Unit two, unit three, unit ten, all thirty-two pieces of precision hardware in the shelter blacked out one after another. Signal feeds severed en masse, all sensor readings flatlined to zero, and the institute’s backend data port went completely blank. In ten short seconds, millions of dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art survey gear turned into cold, useless scrap metal.

The busy work site fell utterly quiet. The whir of machinery, the low hum of analytical tools, the clink of trowels against stone—all sound vanished, leaving only the monotonous patter of rain on the overhead glass to echo through the vast shelter, weighing heavy dread over every person present.

The site’s lead technician sprinted to the main control cabinet, fingers flying across the panel as he scanned every diagnostic interface. Voltage output was stable, primary circuit loops intact, branch power supply functioning normally, no hardware damage registered, zero software glitches logged. Every objective readout proved there was no logical reason for the equipment to fail.

But fail they had. Completely, uniformly, without a single warning sign.

“Power’s good, wiring’s good, the systems show zero faults,” the technician said, swiping sweat from his forehead, his voice trembling with disbelief. “There’s no explanation for this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Unease rippled through the crowd. Crew members set down their tools and exchanged uneasy glances, doubt and quiet fear clouding their faces. Longtime site veterans knew Sanxingdui’s rainy nights always carried an uncanny aura—but nothing on this scale, a synchronized total shutdown of every sensor and scanner, had ever occurred before.

The ground rumbled next, right on cue.

This was not the chaotic, jolting shake of an earthquake. It was a deep, resonant low-frequency thrumming originating hundreds of meters beneath the surface, steady and rhythmic. Once every three seconds, without deviation or fatigue—like the heartbeat of some colossal ancient relic, thrumming through solid bedrock to reverberate across the entire sacrificial pit.

Fine ripples rolled evenly across puddles pooled on the pit floor, forming perfect concentric circles that spread and overlapped in flawless, almost manufactured patterns. The earth beneath their feet felt alive, thrumming with an ancient, unknown pulse that synced perfectly with the nonstop rain overhead.

Ordinary staff only registered mild swaying, an inexplicable bone-deep chill, and an unshakable sense of dread in their chests. They could not pinpoint the source of the oddity, writing it off as some unexplained geological quirk.

Daipithy stood beyond the safety cordon ringing the pit, the only person on-site separated from the rigid routine of official excavation work.

Twenty-four years old, slender, with calm, distant eyes and a quiet, reserved bearing. She held no formal archaeological civil service rank, no official institutional title; her public designation was a contracted artifact microtrace analyst and preliminary ancient pattern screener for the dig. She spent every day lingering along the pit edge, silently observing, scribbling meticulous notes, cross-referencing carved lines on broken relic fragments. Soft-spoken, intensely focused, and easy to overlook, she struck every coworker as just another unremarkable junior field staff member.

No one knew she was the last living heir to the royal bloodline of the Ruins Guardian Bloodline.

The moment every machine went dark and the subterranean thrumming began, a searing heat flared to life in the palm of Daipithy’s right hand. The warmth burned through her skin, through muscle and sinew, down to the core of her meridians—not a sharp, stinging pain, but a crushing, ancient weight that carried the immensity of three thousand years.

Fine pale golden ancient seal runes bloomed silently beneath the skin of her palm, winding and branching into a fully formed dormant totem awakened at last. The glow faded in a heartbeat, vanishing as though it had never surfaced at all.

A vast, desolate wave of primal energy surged upward from an unknown giant man-made underground cavern three hundred meters underground. It tore through packed rammed earth, through million-year rock strata, breaking the fundamental physical laws of the mortal realm as it raced along underground spiritual energy veins to blanket the entire Sanxingdui Site.

This was no geomagnetic disturbance, no shift in tectonic stress, no movement of subterranean groundwater.

It was raw energy leaking from the Void Core Anchor, the slow exhale of a fraying ancient seal—the first stirrings of a rift between two worlds.

Daipithy’s vision fractured instantly.

The harsh floodlights, damp loam, scattered bronze shards, and stunned crew around her shattered, overlapped, stretched, and warped. Time slipped out of alignment, layers of space folded over one another, and the entire landscape of modern excavation melted away. A three-millennia-old spectral vision crashed unbidden into her senses.

An endless stretch of untamed primeval wilderness lay beneath a pitch-black primeval sky. A massive man-dug pit loomed at its center, where countless ancient Shu tribespeople draped in rough linen robes knelt rigidly, their faces solemn and resolute. Giant bronze ritual vessels lined the pit’s floor, and roaring fire sacrifice ritual bonfires cast harsh light over their grim, grief-stricken features.

Some hefted stone tools, striking hard to shatter segments of the Bronze Sacred Tree. Others clutched Bronze Mask with Protruding Eyes tight to their chests, lowering them deep into the soil. A third group carried torches, systematically burning sacrificial relics in ordered batches. Every figure moved with mechanical, cold precision; there was none of the devout reverence of a prayer ceremony, only the unyielding resolve of people marching toward sacrifice.

They were not praying for blessings. They were not offering tribute to gods.

They were burying, they were sealing—using every relic forged by their civilization, every ounce of their people’s collective will, to wall off the all-consuming darkness trapped deep underground.

The vision shattered as if torn apart by an invisible force, and the ancient scene dissolved without a trace.

The mortal world snapped back into focus. The harsh white floodlights still blazed, rain still hammered the glass roof, the crew remained frozen in quiet terror, and the underground pulse continued its steady thrumming. The thousand-year apparition might as well have been nothing more than a fleeting trick of her eyes.

Daipithy’s fingers stiffened slightly, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths, a heavy gravity glinting in her eyes that no ordinary person could detect.

Her bloodline had awakened in childhood, and she had spent years wandering Sanxingdui. She had felt faint echoes of the ancient power beneath the earth countless times, caught tiny fragmented flickers of the past—but never a vision this complete, vivid, and tangible.

Sanxingdui was never merely an ancient civilization ruin.

The bronze masterpieces hailed as priceless cultural treasures by the modern world, the sacrificial rituals debated endlessly by academics, the broken erasures of history lost to written records—all of it formed one vast, meticulously planned seal, crafted to stand for thousands of years.

And tonight, that three-millennia-old barrier was fraying, bit by bit.

Far beneath the soil, the darkness the ancient ancestors had given everything to trap was stirring awake.

Meanwhile, deep within the wooded western hills bordering the site.

The rainy night swallowed all light and noise from the excavation pit, blocked by dense, shadow-choked trees. Amid the thick blackness, a tall silhouette perched motionless atop a treetop, his frame rigid, his aura cold and lifeless—no trace of the warmth unique to living humans, perfectly concealed within the wind and downpour.

This was Kaelor, chief enforcer of the Orb Reavers and a descendant of the Fallen Ancient Realm Wardens.

His silver-grey eyes pierced sheets of rain mist, locked firmly on the glowing excavation pit far in the distance. His pale, slender fingers hovered empty in the air, cradling a tiny black crystal between his palms. Dim shadow light swirled across its surface, thin tendrils of void energy drifting on the breeze to trace and capture every subtle fluctuation rippling off Sanxingdui’s fraying seal.

Three thousand years of hiding. Three thousand years of patience. Three thousand years waiting for the seal’s power to dwindle.

Tonight, the Wood Ruin Seal faltered across its full perimeter for the first time. Void Core Anchor energy spilled outward, and the void rift drew its first breath.

The moment he had waited for had finally arrived.

A faint, icy smirk tugged at the corner of Kaelor’s lips. His low, gravelly voice blended seamlessly into the patter of rain, unheard by any mortal ear.

“Ruin Guardians. Your debt is finally due.”

Darkness roiled through the forest undergrowth, four other shadow figures emerged beside Kaelor, making five in total. A hunt targeting the dual ruin seals—and the Ruin Guardian Unit—had officially begun.